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Material generation: Wealth is top priority

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published January 23, 2007

new priorities: New polls show that the obsession with material things is growing - and that being rich is more important to today's young people than in the past. UCLA's annual survey of college freshmen, released Friday, found that nearly three-quarters of those surveyed in 2006 thought it was essential or very important to be "very well-off financially." That compares with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966, the first year the survey was done. Another recent poll from the Pew Research Center found that about 80 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds see getting rich as a top life goal.

PARENTS TO BLAME?: David Walsh, a psychologist who heads the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis, believes parents have played an integral role in encouraging materialism. His research found that, when adjusted for inflation, parents spend 500 percent more on kids today than just one generation earlier. "A lot of parents have developed an allergic reaction to their kids being unhappy," he says.

PATH TO UNHAPPINESS: Some see the heightened expectations setting up inevitable disappointment. "There are a lot of young people hitting 25 who are making, say, $35,000 a year, who expected they'd be millionaires or at least making six figures," says psychologist Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before. No wonder, she says, that 20somethings talk about the "quarter-life crisis."

[Last modified January 23, 2007, 01:13:31]